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Last day in Tbilisi. Sitting in front of the computer here at Prospero’s Bookstore, which I can understand is a true haven for a large part of the ex-pat community here as well as locals who wants to get a different feel from most places in Georgia.

I fly back to Copenhagen tonight.

Yesterday I went to the Kazbegi area north in Georgia, close to the Russian border. The mini-bus trip took 3 hours each way. Sunday I was in sunny Batumi, Monday we drove through snow on our way to Kazbegi.

While there, Davit and I walked with some other Georgians to the Gergeti Holy Trinity Church - also called Tsminda Sameba). Here is a picture I took when we were close to it:

Tornike, my Georgian friend, just arrived.

In my mind, I build the movie I will edit when I get back to Copenhagen tomorrow.

It is past midnight, and I am on an internet cafe on Vazha Pshavela street in Batumi. We arrived Batumi this morning by train from Tbilisi. The night train was quite comfortable, and it cost only $15. We checked in to Pyramid Hotel, went to the beach - this was my first time seeing the Black Sea - and got some breakfast. Then we split up, and I spent the rest of the day untill lunch walking around this sub-tropical city, visiting the Mosque, the Church (Church of the Virgin Mary), the market, and a few cafes. The buildings here are very different from in Tbilisi, and the city overall has a very different feeling from any other city I have seen so far in Georgia.

After lunch we took a cab to a church which is on a hill looking down over the city. It was great to see the city above and to see the building of the church (or was it just being built up again from scratch after a fire?) I will upload pictures once I get back to Denmark.

Our dinner tonight was traditional Georgian; very tasty and inexpensive. After dinner we went to the beach with a watermelon and some vodka, and it was great sitting there on the pebbles on the Batumi beach looking at the stars and eating vodka-drenched water melon with friends.

While there, on the beach, I thought back to these last days here in Georgia. I have now been here almost two weeks. I have experienced a Georgian parliamentary election, I have held workshops at a seminar, I have thought a lot about new media tools in those parts of the world where the internet IS rather slow. It is easy to talk about the wonders of videoblogging if you are on a T1 connection - not quite as enjoyable if it takes 3 minutes to even begin to watch a movie on youtube.

Tomorrow we will go to Sarpi further south on the Georgian coastline, close to the Turkish border. The beach is much nicer there, and I will get my first swim of the year. Tomorrow will also June 1st! What happened to these first months of 2008? Dang.

I will be back in Denmark Wednesday morning, and then it time to work a lot, catch up on things I haven’t looked at while here, and focus on progress on those projects I work on.

But I guess one effect of this trip is that I feel the urge to blog more often. Admittedly, it is mostly rather superficial at the moment, but I cannot always do the deep questions-probing.

I will see if I can get some sleep now and get up early tomorrow to take more footage from Batumi.

I am still in Georgia, having finished the seminar today. Tonight, I will take the night train to Batumi on the coast of the Black Sea. I will travel with a fellow participant of the seminar and two of her friends. We will stay in Batumi untill Sunday night when we will take the train back to Tbilisi

I have never seen the Black Sea, and I look really forward to this trip. Batumi is a famous tourist destination - not only for Georgians, but also Armenians and Turks.

When I come back from Batumi on Monday I will take a 1-day trip into the Caucasian mountains, but that is for another blog entry.

Yesterday, I was at an excellent bookstore in Tbilisi (Prospero’s Books) where they have quite a big section for English-languaged books. I bought two books: Stories I Stole by Wendell Steavenson and Georgia Diary by Thomas Goltz. I have begun with the Wendell book, and I find it quite enjoyable to recognize this country and city in the pages of this 6 year old book.

Today, I then read the Georgia News Digest from the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, and I read things like:

Speaking during a televised session of Georgia’s National Security Council on May 27, Saakashvili stated that Russia could no longer be trusted to act as an impartial peace-broker in Abkhazia. Moscow, he insisted, “pretends to play at peacekeeping” in Abkhazia and such misbehavior “annuls this peacekeeping role.”

“It is absolutely clear that Georgia cannot remain in such a situation when we all, together with our international partners, are sitting and waiting for [a new] provocation,” he said. Saakashvili did not specify precisely how Tbilisi would try to overhaul Abkhazia’s peacekeeping format.

If Russia does not agree to a Georgian proposal to change the peacekeeping format in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict zone, Tbilisi could declare Russian peacekeepers occupiers, a Georgian MP said Wednesday.

US Deputy Permanent Representative Alejandro Wolff has made comments about a report on “an incident occurred at 09:53.31 local time on 20 April 2008, when “a MIG-29 “Fulcrum” Russian fighter jet shot down an unarmed Georgian reconnaissance drone (UAV) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs over Georgian territory”.

[Presenter] The incident in which Georgian buses came under fire on the day of the parliamentary election [21 May] was staged. This statement was made today by the state security service of the unrecognized republic of Abkhazia. It refers to the incident in Zugdidi Region; the footage was shown on the Georgian [TV] channel Rustavi-2.

According to Tbilisi, the vehicles carrying Georgian voters were fired on from the direction of Abkhazia. Sukhumi, however, says it has evidence to the contrary. [Russian] peacekeepers, who have a road block just 500 m. from the scene of the incident, have also confirmed that fire was opened from Georgian territory.

All of these quotes are from different news channels that I do not know well, and I am uncertain what to think of them. I do know that the stakes are high: Both the U.S. and Russia wants as much control in this area as possible. Behind every press release, there is a web of intentions and history that I cannot decode currently. I am reading up on the political history, but it takes time: This is a complex region and I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

At the moment, I am merely trying to get to know some people here and follow the news.

I am in Tbilisi, at an internet cafe near Rustaveli Avenue. I have been here for 10 days now.

I left Copenhagen on Sunday May 18th. At Kastrup Airport, I met up with Anna, who is a Polish student of journalism who is currently studying in Denmark (the Erasmus programme), who would also be an election observer in Georgia. We also spent the five hours together in Riga, waiting for the next flight to Tbilisi.

When we arrived Tbilisi at about 4 AM local time, we met with some of the other Danes (who had flown via Istanbul) and went to the hotel. On the way to the city centre I just stared out the window, seeking out as much as I could. I could see all the posters for the different political parties, and I noticed the numerous taxis and gas stations. We arrived the hotel and checked in. I was exhausted.

Monday 19th was a day mainly spent preparing for the Election Observer Mission (EOM) in Tbilisi. I helped Anna go to the Azeri embassy to get her visa for Azerbaijan where she would go after the election observation. She would attend a workshop on human rights there - I forget the details. I took some videos and pictures, however, and in the afternoon I went with Peter (the Danish photographer) and Anna on a trip to the mountains outside Tbilisi, seeing among other things the view from the television tower outside Tbilisi. We spent the night at a Georgian restaurant where I ate some Very nice food - I forget the name.

Early Tuesday 20th we went to Rustavi, which is a smaller city southeast in Georgia, close to the border to Azerbaijan. Rustavi is a typical city that used to have a lot of industrial activity that has died down later years. It is a pretty run-down city, and there are large holes in the road, but I liked the people I met there. Actually, I want to return to Rustavi if possible.

The tuesday was mostly spent on lecturing the observers about their role as election observers. What to look for, how to behave, etc. Also they were given some update on the Georgian political situation. Me, I spent a lot of the day running errands, getting Georgian SIM cards for the polling station mobile phones, etc.

Wednesday 21st was election day. I was up at 4.30 AM, preparing my things. At 6 we all met, and at 6.40 we went out to the different polling stations. The day was hectic, and I spent most of it in a taxi between polling stations, taking video footage as well as trying to understand the situation at the different stations. Especially in the Marneuli district, which is in the country-side, we experienced some conflicts. But overall it went well, and at 8 PM we watched as they closed the polling stations and the counting process began. I will write about my experiences during the counting of votes in another blog entry.

Thursday 22nd at 11 AM we had a press conference, where our main conclusion was that the elections overall were conducted in a fair way. Unfortunately, we had not processed all the information from the polling stations yet, so we could not give a full account of the situation in for instance my polling station. After the press conference, lunch, and working on our individual reports from the polling stations, we went to Tbilisi again, where some of us attended the OSCE press conference at 5 PM. I was there, listening to the words, thinking about this country, this whole region, and the different world powers that have interests here.

Thursday night we had a farewell dinner at a Georgian restaurant, saying goodbye to our Belarusian and Azeri friends - they would not join us for the following seminar in Tbilisi.

Friday 23rd we went to our new hotel outside Tbilisi and started our programme in the seminar on gender and sexual minorities issues as well as the usage of “web 2.0 tools” in organizations. The hotel is nice, there is less dust in the air there than in Rustavi or central Tbilisi (I had developed a cough while in Georgia which still haunts me every night), and the staff is friendly.

It is now Wednesday May 28th, and our seminar ends on Friday. Monday was national holiday here in Georgia, and there were some demonstrations by the opposition in the afternoon which I am glad did not lead to any violent confrontations with the police or army. Since Saturday I have done a series of workshops teaching the participants about different tools, be it blogging, videoblogging, twitter or del.icio.us, and I have always been very aware of the problem that — I must do all this in a way that can inspire them. Talking about the wonders of new media helps them nothing if they don’t see how They can benefit from it. The problem is that there is no quick fix. Establishing a blog does Not guarantee visibility to a national or global audience.

The internet access while being here has been quite bad, particularly before thursday last week when we came to the new hotel. I had also hoped that I could use twitter to give live updates from the field during the election, but the Georgian SIM cards seemed to not work for sending to the UK-based twitter number.

It is 5.30 PM now, and I will enjoy my two hours of free time before we go to some Georgian bath house. Tomorrow I will have another workshop session, but I also need to work with them on a one-on-one basis.

I have extended my stay here in Georgia till tuesday night next week - four days extra. I will spend those extra days taking as much videos as I can, interviewing locals and exploring diferent aspects of this culture. One of my goals is to get to understand the Georgian alphabet which now seems like total gibberish to me

I have made great friends while here, and I hope to be able to follow the development of this country and region at a closer range the coming years.

I will post more within a few days.

My second video for videoblogging week 2008 is a short introduction to Joy, one of the presenters at Canal Africa (site will be revamped soon), which is a local tv station in Copenhagen. I will help Canal Africa to put some of their content online as well as use the more interactive elements of videoblogging/new media in their daily work.

Click To Play

I met Rene Noukeu a few weeks ago through a common friend of ours, and we immediately clicked. We have the same point of view of the image that is attached to Africa (as well as most other regions in the world) by western media.

Why oh why do we need to be bombarded with just the sad news from Africa? Why do many of us keep having the impression that we need to go down there and help them, instead of us seeing us and them as equal partners that can learn from each other and enrich each other’s lives?

One of the phrases that Rene has repeated to me is: “We want Africa to be part of the world, not outside the world”. The whole concept of “the third world” is, however much I can understand its usage in situations, horrendous. We have a bunch of countries, and we label them all “third world” or “developing countries”. Oh, it’s very convenient.

I have never been to Africa myself, and I have in fact never been to a “third world country”, so I may just be blowing out of my butt here, but this is something that I really feel emotional about.

When I first learned about videoblogging, it was this kind of cross-cultural communication that I thought of. I remember being at VloggerCon in NYC in January 2005 and in this session I kept thinking about what I wanted, in the long run, from all of this. In the end, what I said was kind of vague, but the geist was there. Real communication between people in a global context. Since then, I spent more time thinking about all of these issues rather than actively working on the concepts and making them work.

Meeting Rene and his team helped all those old issues come to the forefront again for me, and it is a very inspiring experience. I look forward to working with Canal Africa in developing tools and workflows that work for them, and I will document our process here on DLTQ.

March 2005 is 3 years ago, and this post is about the posts that some videobloggers made in that month.

March 2005 was pre-Youtube. We were still enthusiastic about this, in a different way from today. First I will introduce that month’s work by four videobloggers I deeply respect, as well as my own from that month, and then I will make my own remix of all the footage from that month.

#1: Jay Dedman @ March 2005

Scanning down that archive page we see that March 2005 included the beginning of Videoblogging week 2005, it included the infamous eyeball-video, the coca-cola dance video, and a video about his Northern Voice appearance.

#2: Erik Nelson @ March 2005
Again, some Videoblogging Week 2005 videos are included, and a bicycle video, a view of a Dutch church, and a well.

#3: Charlene Rule @ March 2005

The Belt, doing the taxes, stalking the veteran, ways of seeing.

#4: Chris Weagel @ March 2005

Unpacking the goods, The Fourteen Rules of ealth (watch this!), Robot Hand, Dr Videoblog, Number Thirteen.

#5 Myself @ March 2005

Anne Promotes Sarajevsko, meeting Mr. Hadziomerovic, birth of a letter, going home, a day out.

These five individuals recording parts of our lives and sharing it.

Now: A remix of the videos that I refer to above:

Click to play

A few years ago, I wrote about Intermediated Conferences here on DLTQ after the Mena/Ben blowup at the Les Blogs 2.0 conference in Paris. Since then, I have over and over seen how a backchannel has affected the conference, in constructive and - less constructive - ways.

This week at SXSW we saw it again, and - once more - big headlines. The Zuckerberg keynote got its drama, and I refuse to link to any of the accounts. I am sure you will find it elsewhere. Another story which is perhaps less known was how the audience at another session, well covered in this blog post. What I found the most interesting, though, was this chatlog which really showed the development of the mood in the backchannel.

I think All conference organizers who can expect more than a few geeks to attend Really should take the backchannel into account. Even if the conference doesnt provide any “official back-channel”, people are going to find ways to exchange opinions online. And the conference organizers better smart up and find ways to engage in conversations with these people.

In a few hours, I am taking the early flight from Copenhagen to Paris, where I will hang out with Jeffrey Taylor, Ryanne Hodson, Jay Dedman and others. I could not make it to Paris on Sunday for the vlog dinner, but I am sure that we will figure out things to do. Or - alternatively - not do.

I need this vacation, this time in a different environment. I have not wanted to bore you guys with the gory story of the last months, but there are some familiar issues that have taken their toll on me. I apologize for not posting more here, but this vlog has simply had a downgraded priority.

Now: Video evidence

Click To Play

The music is by Buckethead (Alektorophobia, from In Search Of The)

For these three days in paris (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) I will have three themes that will function as a framework::

Monday: Aesthetics
How important is the production value in videoblogging? How can we navigate through the different genres and standads?
How does the aesthetic point of view express itself in the Parisian way of life?

Tuesday: Ethics
With all these new tools within interactive media, do we not have a moral obligation to utilize these tools more? To “spread the word” and help ever more people to realize the power that they have?
What is the status of social consciousness in present Paris, present France?

Wednesday: Methods
What is the development of the methodology of videoblogging today? Do we have perhaps a wrong set of cases for best-practice?
Paris is a world city, on level with New York, London and Tokyo. How does this city cope with the ever evolving challenges? What methods do they use that maybe differ from these other mega-cities?

As expressed in the video, this trip is for me also a case of finding my passion for videoblogging again. It is not lost, but I need to renew it. Meeting other videobloggers will hopefully help. At least I know that Jay, Ryanne and Jeffrey, along with Loiez see videoblogging as much much more than yet another distribution channel for content formats that are already in existence.

A few rules for my filming these days:

* 10 second shots (inspired by Susans early videos)
* Notice the particulars.

I hate Oslo.

In weak moments, I also love it, but I mostly hate this city, the capital of Norway.

I have lived in Oslo several years, in the Kolbotn area outside it, and I remember from already back then when I was 9-10 years old: I hated the city. There was something about the look of the city that disgusted me.

Yes, there are very nice parts of Oslo, and I have always enjoyed Holmenkollen, Bygdøy and the forests outside the city that are so readily available. I enjoy the Vigeland park, as this video was a testament to.

I arrived Oslo half an our ago, tired from the bus ride with a drunkard just behind me shouting all night: “Are we not in Oslo yet? Jesus!”. When we arrived Göteborg (halfway on the way to Oslo) he was SO ready to leave the bus, but went into a fit when he was told that no, this was not Oslo. Funny, tragic.

So, I arrived Oslo half an hour ago, and I walked on the passage between the bus station and the train station, and deep down in my guts, I shivered. This is the only city I have visited that gives me this reaction. There is something about Oslo trying to hard to be an international city, and it cannot, even though it is the capital of Norway.

Perhaps I just conveniently make Oslo the scapegoat for all the negative feelings I have for Norway, my own country. All my distaste with the complacency, the headlines in newspapers going “Norway is the world’s best country!”, the patting ourselves on the back, staying out of the European Union because we are so darned afraid of losing our independence again, and going shopping around the world with our oil money.

There are a lot of good people in Norway, but there is a part of the culture and the public debate that is bugging me, that is making me as physically ill as I feel when I arrive Oslo from a lengthy absence. Let’s see how I feel when I arrive Bergen later today.

Norway disgusts me, and yet they are - literally - my people.